CNBC's Gasparino Joining the Plunge Protection Team?

The Plunge Protection Team has a new name: Charlie Gasparino. Tuesday, for the second time in eight trading sessions, CNBC's "on-air editor" marched out to the cameras to report, near the depths of very weak intraday action, that some people, somewhere, were working on something related to propping up Ambac (ABK), the imperiled monoline insurer.*

"I'd be very careful about trading off this information," he warned us today. As if.

We heard the chatter about Cisco's John Chambers as well, but let's be honest: It's the Ambac thing that sparked the afternoon's animal spirits.

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*Which reminds us of a great pad of post-it notes: The smiling face of a 1950s-era woman, implicitly a prototypical "secretary," next to the words "someone called...about something." The Bartleby-esque indifference of which strikes us as very, very funny.